Several prominent big-tech leaders embrace transhumanist and related ideas, from anti-aging methods to limit-less life extension, the development of brain-computer interfaces to human-AI merging and “consciousness upload”. Death is no longer viewed as part of life, but as unnecessary and avoidable — a system defect that has to be fixed. Transhumanists believe (or want to make us believe) they can get hold of that fix.
There is a bunch of ‘isms’ that are related to Transhumanism, like Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Longtermism and so on. These isms are all interrelated, and it’s next to impossible to view any of them as a standalone idea. The computer scientist Timnit Gebru and the philosopher Émile P. Torres coined the term TESCREAL as an umbrella term for these interrelated ideas.
TESCREAL is an acronym for a colorful bouquet of bizarre, absurd ideas that are hostile to humanity and nature at large. The term TESCREAL was coined by the transhumanist critics Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru, as an umbrella-term for some of the inter-related ideas which are circulating in the transhumanist scene. It was first publicly used in their 2023 draft of the paper titled “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”.
The “T” stands for transhumanism. This is the backbone of the TESCREAL bundle. The next three letters of the acronym — Extropianism, Singularitarianism, and Cosmism — are (in Gebru’s and Torres’ opinions) supposed to be just variations of transhumanism. I think this is true for Extropianism, the original idea from which transhumanism evolved, and for cosmism, but it is pretty freestyle to regard singularitarianism as a variation of transhumanism. The “R” is for rationalism in the good old-fashioned sense of Descartes — I do not understand how it made it into the acronym. Then comes Effective Altruism (EA) and the “L” is for longtermism.
Let’s break that down. I’m giving a short intro into each of these ideas, but it should be enough to see what the transhumanist folks are up to.
transhumanism is a concept of technologically re-engineering the human species into a superior new race called “posthumans”, with super-human abilities like total control over emotions, extremely high IQ and immortality. This also explains why some TESCREAL adherents are in favor of eugenics. According to Torres, some transhumanists have imagined “enhancing” our moral capacities by slipping “morality-boosting” chemicals into the public water supply.
The singularity is short for technological singularity, a hypothetical event in the future, in which technological development is beyond human comprehension, and thus beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization.
Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that the singularity is the creation of super-intelligence —which, in their minds, of course is based on information technology—, called AGI (artificial general intelligence), which far surpasses human intelligence and that the arrival of an AGI is imminent. Well, it has been imminent for several decades (go ask Ray Kurzweil), but had to be postponed each and every time.
All of this is pretty fuzzy. Wikipedia defines the technical singularity as “a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization.”. What kind of growth, a qualitative growth, where a new technology exhibits novel features or the sheer mass deployment of (possibly a certain) technology? I suppose no one in the 19th century, when large scale industrialization began, predicted that greenhouse gases would cause global warming. There you have your unpredicted change which does affect human civilization.
It gets more fuzzy with AGI. Without any proper definition of intelligence (there is no generally agreed-upon definition of intelligence, neither in science, nor in public), some folks started working on “Artificial General Intelligence”, trying to create a super-intelligent artefact without the premises being clarified.
The core idea of cosmism —called “active evolution”— is that humans must consciously transform nature, overcome death by either biological or digital immortality, and resurrect past generations. Bring out the dead!
Nothing new here, but the good old-fashioned rationalism in its form since René Descartes. In my book, rationalism isn’t inherently bad as long as one doesn’t use it as the magical silver bullet to solve each and any problem. I don’t know why Torres and Gebru include it in TESCREAL.
The term EA (Effective Altruism) was popularized by philosophers like Peter Singer and William MacAskill. It sounds nice until you dig a bit deeper. Singer and MacAskill argue for charity based on impartial, detached altruism, which leaves out the reciprocity in human face-to-face interactions.
In a 2015 debate, when presented with a scenario of either saving a child from a burning building or saving a Picasso painting to sell and donate the proceeds to charity, William MacAskill responded that the effective altruist should save and sell the Picasso.
Effective altruism focuses on technological solutions to problems like poverty, disregarding the structural problems that cause poverty in the first place, i.e. the inequalities in the distribution of resources, which led to EA being criticized as pseudo-scientific.
The term longtermism was coined around 2017 by Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord. Its roots trace back to effective altruism. Longtermism focuses on the future on scales bigger than usual, with a strong emphasis to influence that future positively. It aims to prevent human extinction and the collapse of human civilization.
On first sight, this looks like some noble goals, but the rigorous application of these ideas in longtermism comes with some problems and more than just unpleasant side effects: Long-range forecasting is notoriously unreliable. Apart from setting up ridiculous time-scales for goals, which, from a rational viewpoint, cannot ever be reached in the first place (AGI in 5-10 years), the longtermism scene completely ignores this. Longtermism can downplay or even accept acute suffering for a speculative future, which is not only utterly cynic, but also an age-old manipulation technique: too bad that those folks suffer now, but you know, it’s for a better future. Forecasting and prioritizing a glorious future with such a mindset can justify risky and/or extreme interventions like setting up totalitarian regimes.
The promotion of such a glorious future with super-humans, achieved through technology alone, neglecting the role of nowadays political structures in the suffering of the majority of mankind, rings a bell. It is no coincidence that this is reminiscent of the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich.
Here, I focus on the most prominent advocates of transhumanism and briefly outline their views.
Pursues a biological-digital “symbiosis” via Neuralink to merge human brains with artificial intelligence. His ideas to colonize Mars cooled down quite a bit.
Supports the future “merge” of humans and AI, and has invested in projects aiming to redesign human descendants and upload consciousness. In an interview with the Financial Times, Altman described AGI as a “magic intelligence in the sky”, which sounds like OpenAI tries to build some from of deity.
When confronted with the enormous energy and water consumption used to build and operate LLM-based AI, Altman replied in a very special way:
"One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model ... But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart. "
Sam Altman at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, Feb. 19, 2026. Source: CNBC
Clean water and energy — humans first or machines first? It seems as though Altman isn’t so sure about who comes first here.
Publicly discusses transhumanist philosophies and has financially backed anti-aging and life-extension research.
No-one illuminated transhumanist ideology better than him, when he was interviewed by Ross Douthat for New York Times in 2025. Douthat asked Thiel if he would prefer the human race to endure. He visibly faltered, struggling to answer that question. After being asked by Douthat that same question three times more, he finally managed to squeeze out a reluctant “yes”, followed by an explanation of his transhumanist worldview:
"Transhumanism is this… radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. "
Peter Thiel, in an interview with Ross Douthat for New York Times, 2025
That doesn’t sound like a mere upgrade but more like a replacement of a lowly life-form. It raises some serious questions that haven’t been answered yet by the transhumanist scene: Who will get access to that promised existence as some super-human? Do we even want that? Will those that can’t, don’t want or are denied to join the Cyber Reich continue to co-exist with the super-race or will they be left behind? How would a co-existence or being left behind look like?
Bezos interests in transhumanism are cellular reprogramming and extreme longevity. He invested 3 billion USD into Altos Labs. The company employs world-class scientists to reverse cellular aging and biological disease, aiming to rejuvenate human tissues and extend healthy human life. While undoubtedly being a leech to anyone and any society that gets in touch with his business, he looks pretty sane compared to the rest of the transhumanists.
The Google co-founders have long viewed human biology as a software system that can be debugged and upgraded. In 2013, they launched Calico Life Sciences (California Life Company) under the Alphabet umbrella. Calico acts as a secretive, elite research lab tasked with mapping the biology of aging and conquering death. Brin’s interest is also driven by personal genetics; he has funded over $1 billion into Parkinson’s and longevity research.
Zuckerberg embraces the transhumanist pillar of using bio-digital engineering to completely eradicate human biological vulnerabilities. Through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, he and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged billions to a highly ambitious medical project. Their stated mission is to cure, manage, or prevent all human diseases by the end of the century using advanced AI and cellular mapping.
Ellison is one of the earliest tech titans to view death not as an inevitability, but as an engineering flaw. He established the Ellison Medical Foundation, and has poured more than $430 million specifically into aging research. He has famously stated that he finds the concept of death “makes no sense” to him and treats it as a technical problem to solve.
The founder of Braintree (Venmo) is one of Silicon Valley’s most public extreme biohackers. Through his company Kernel, he builds brain-computer interfaces to read brain waves. Through Project Blueprint, he spends millions annually to systematically reverse the biological age of his own organs. His Goal is achieving “velocity escape room” longevity where humans can live indefinitely by replacing failing biological systems with optimized code and tech.
In May 2026, he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis (AIG), a chronic condition where the immune system attacks the acid-producing cells in the stomach lining. He commented on this with “my stomach is eating itself”.
While not a traditional big-tech founder, Kurzweil is the ultimate ideological godfather of Silicon Valley’s transhumanism. As a futurist and long-time engineering director at Google, his theories shape the culture of the tech elite. He popularized the concept of The Singularity — the point where human intelligence merges with AI. Kurzweil actively advocates for nano-robots in the bloodstream to replace biological organ, and for mind uploading and exchanging the human body for some robotic machinery.
Transhumanism does not try to address current severe problems like mass extinction of species and a climate crisis, apart from vague promises that AGI will solve such problems. Rather, it seems to be a symptom of the kind of thinking that has created such problems in the first place.
The grandiose narrative of a marvelous future is smoke and screens, avoiding to engage in grounded ethics, avoiding to address injustices and challenges, and, generally, is a ploy to distract from the current moment. It is a narrative that encourages us to hit the gas even harder, expropriate the environment even more and faster, totally ignoring the devastation such behaviour has already caused.
Transhumanism does not acknowledge the fact that human is an animal embedded in complex relations with other species and nature at large. Instead, the transhumanist aspiration of being god is an attempt to totally detach from these complex relations by technocratic schemes that already have proven to utterly fail each and every time they have been employed, and lays claim to total dominion over nature and the body, subordinating everything else to its goals.
A real “upgrade” or “enhancement” of humankind (and quite possibly its only chance for long-term survival) would be to understand the causes of unchecked exploitative behaviour in order to change such behaviour, and rather to be focused on the health and sustainability of humans complex relations with its environment.
Transhumanism does not only clearly stand in the way of that, it is the opposite of it, literally. It is the narrative of a machine destroying its very fundamentals, and, on its way into oblivion, taking everything else with it.
Émile P. Torres, The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares
futurism.com, Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God
CNBC Sam Altman defends AI resource usage: Water concerns ‘fake,’ and ‘humans use energy too’
New York Times, Inside the alarming cyborg future ‘transhumanists’ Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are already preparing for
The Conversation, Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities – the outcomes could change what it means to be human